Families gathered in the Centennial Arts Center to celebrate their children’s commitment to helping others in need. The ceremony also honored the living legacy of the alum who inspired the society’s creation, Axel Bostrom ’24, who died following a car accident in June 2025.

Axel grew up volunteering. For the Bostroms, a military family, service was a shared value and a way to get to know each community they entered. Axel’s Eagle Scout project benefited Bethesda Cares, a Maryland organization that helps people experiencing homelessness. In Massachusetts, he participated annually in A Shot For Life, a basketball challenge that raises money for brain cancer research. And in his everyday interactions, he consistently took the initiative to care for others, including helping new students acclimate to CA.

Having heard an outpouring of stories of Axel’s generosity from his friends and the CA community, Robyn says that as she and her husband, Paul Bostrom P’24, considered how to honor their son’s memory, “positivity and light were the two words that came to mind.” By the end of the summer, they knew they wanted to encourage service.

In CA, whose only award is given to alums for service, Robyn saw philosophical alignment. She wanted to recognize the service CA students already engage in through clubs and weekend volunteer outings organized by the Student Life Office, provide more resources to broaden those volunteer opportunities, and make service more visible alongside academics, the arts, and athletics at CA. She hoped to create new student leadership positions and encourage additional aid to local communities by developing a resource any CA club, team, student, or faculty member could use to organize service trips. She wanted all students to have an opportunity to participate, and she hoped to give those who knew Axel a positive way to channel their grief. 

“I think of Axel like a prism,” she says. “He shined his light, and it refracted on everybody who ever met him. To me, service is like that. One person’s gift of time and attention can impact so many people.”

That’s why in May, she presented a crystal prism to each of the society’s first 20 members, who had all given 100 or more hours of service. Additional students were recognized for meeting an inaugural “Six for ’26” spring-semester challenge and for 10, 25, 50, and 75 hours of service.

At the ceremony, Grant Hightower, assistant head for student life, reflected on Axel as a standout scholar and athlete and a role model for his dedication to his communities. “To bring positivity and light requires only that you recognize those around you as worthy of receiving yours,” he said. “Light and positivity are infinite resources. When you care to use your light to illuminate your neighbor’s path, your flame does not flicker or fade. Instead, the road simply gets brighter. By choosing to serve, you aren’t just performing a task. You are refusing to let the darkness of isolation win. You are proving that when we stop trying to blend into the unseen and dare to reflect one another’s brilliance, we don’t just see the path ahead, we become the way for others to find it as well.”

The PALS Planning Committee had asked students to submit reflections on their volunteer journeys. Many attested to the profound personal impact of their service.

At CA, Lyle Waldek ’26, an inaugural PALS member, co-headed the Lawrence-Concord Action Partnership, organizing student trips to Lazarus House Ministries and outdoor cleanups in Lawrence, Mass., and �鶹���� Notes of Compassion, a group that performs at senior living residences. Over time, he wrote, “I have been able to see that service of any kind is much more complex, collaborative, and beautiful than I believed it to be.”

Many other students recognized by PALS had previously spent years volunteering. With experience at Project 351, Cradles to Crayons, Rise Against Hunger, and the YMCA, among other local organizations, Melina Petropulos ’28 is a teen ambassador at her local food pantry in Newton, Mass., as well as a PALS student ambassador and one of the society’s first members. “I’ve come to think that empathy without action is incomplete,” she wrote.

For others, service was a new step. Christopher Choy ’27 recognized that, living in Boston, he’d been conditioned to view the unhoused community through the social stigma that goes unchecked in mainstream media. “I wanted to confront the stereotypes about homelessness and learn more about how the unhoused could be cared for instead of stigmatized,” he wrote. 

The personal interactions he had while volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter in Cambridge, Mass., revealed his similarities with residents and helped him understand the complex systemic factors that contribute to homelessness and inequality. He will serve as a PALS student ambassador during the 2026–27 school year.

Gavi Miller ’27 wanted to see her fellow CA students more involved with the Concord, Mass., community. This fall, she started a reading buddies partnership with kindergarteners at Alcott Elementary School. “Now, every other week, I get to watch my vision come to life: students just starting their academic journey looking up to ones with experience,” she wrote. “They learn from us, and we learn from them.”

In the first year of PALS, CA students showed their commitment to communities in Concord and beyond. By being so motivated to serve without any graduation requirement, Robyn says, they set a “gold standard.” She’s proud to have created a pathway at CA to recognize their contributions and, just as importantly, to have opened up more opportunities for them to experience the joy of lending a helping hand.

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A CA student co-authored the first article in a peer-reviewed journal to examine state-level racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates. In summer 2021,��Joanne Oh ’23��interned with Michael Siegel, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Their rigorous statistical research demonstrates that COVID vaccination disparities across the United States correlate with measures of structural racism. The paper, published in October 2021 in the��Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, recommends interventions that go beyond targeting individual behavior.

“Until she did the research, people talked about this relationship, but no one ever looked at it—Joanne actually proved it,” Siegel told CA’s Medical Club last May on campus. “Her research shows that we are framing a structural problem as an individual-level problem, because most interventions have been aimed at eliminating ‘vaccine hesitancy.”

That phrase took hold during the pandemic, Siegel explained. But describing the problem in those terms shifts blame from systems that limit access to health care onto the individuals experiencing harm.

Both researcher and advocate, Siegel routinely shares his findings with legislators. “Only if you understand structural racism as a contributor can you pinpoint an effective approach to reducing racial disparities,” he said at CA. “Joanne’s research made a difference. It’s an amazing accomplishment.”

Joanne participated remotely in Siegel’s research, analyzing data collected state by state. The other team members were graduate students already trained in writing scientific papers. “It was a bit intimidating at first, especially on Zoom,” Joanne says, “but I was really glad I had that experience of breaking out of my shell, challenging myself, and asking questions—even the ones that felt obvious or dumb. It helped me grow.”

She enjoyed it so much that in June 2022, she collected additional data. Building on their previous research, Siegel’s team has now assembled a structural racism index—tracking incarceration, educational attainment, racial segregation, employment, and economic status—for every U.S. state, county, and city. Joanne was in charge of the incarceration index, and she has co-authored a new paper that will soon be published.

“It’s really important to have this data out there,” she says. “Now other teams can use it to research any other health disparities to more effectively promote health policies at all levels, especially locally—that’s where a lot of policies are made.”

Joanne says joining a research team was “eye-opening.” If she could give her earlier self advice, “it would be that I’ll learn, and next time, I’ll be a better researcher,” she says. “That mindset really helped me this year.”

This fall, the Medical Club, which Joanne co-heads, began supporting COVID vaccination drives in Metro Boston areas with low vaccination rates. They set up raffles to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Prior to her research experience, Joanne’s medical interests were clinical. Now she’s less certain about that path. “What I know for sure right now,” she says, “is that I’m really interested in public health.”

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On April 22, 2022—�鶹����’s 100th birthday—the CA community bestowed on Dr. Adnan Zubcevic ’75 the Centennial Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award for his lifetime of advocacy for immigrants and refugees and care for their mental health.��This award was first given to Joan Shaw Herman ’46 herself, posthumously, in 1976, when the Alum Association established her as an inspiring figure for generations to come.

Herman, who was paralyzed after contracting polio the summer after her graduation from CA, continued to express herself artistically and worked to improve the lives of other individuals with physical disabilities. Her story speaks to the power that resilience, generosity, and an enduring desire to make life better for others can have, and why this award is so important at �鶹����. Each year this award is presented, the CA community holds up a new example of what it means to honor CA’s mission as we each cultivate empathy, integrity, and responsibility within ourselves to build a more just and sustainable future.

Joan Shaw Herman’s Story

Who was Joan Shaw Herman ’46? When this young woman graduated from �鶹����, her greatest talents were writing and painting, and she had a promising future. She had been accepted at Wellesley College and was looking forward to first spending the summer working at an American Friends Service Committee Camp. And she did that wholeheartedly, throwing herself into digging ditches and cutting down trees. Never wanting to waste a minute of living on sleep, Joan stayed up late each night, talking with her fellow workers, and, unfortunately, swimming in a contaminated river. Despite her youth and bountiful energy, she wasn’t immune to disease; by the end of the summer, polio had left Herman paralyzed from the neck down.��

Instead of matriculating at Wellesley, she entered the New Britain Memorial Hospital for the Chronically Ill in Connecticut. There she lived for most of her life thereafter, confined within an iron lung, a full-body-encasing tank respirator that was necessary to support her breathing. But Herman used her confinement for religious study. What she might have viewed as the end of her life prompted her to discover new adaptations as well as to turn her attention to improving the lives of others. As she said, she believed that “selfishness and self-indulgence are our only true limitations and prisons.”

After she was hospitalized, Herman began taking a correspondence course in journalism and creative writing. Using a stick held between her teeth, she learned to type her own essays, poetry, and letters to friends on an electric typewriter. She similarly resumed painting, holding the brush in her mouth.

Herman left a lasting influence through her work on behalf of others with disabilities. In 1995, she founded New Horizons, a fellowship of individuals with physical disabilities, who were nevertheless devoted to adventuresome living. She later became the vice president of its board and editor of its publications. Herman and her colleagues created a program to assist fellow individuals with disabilities in leading challenging, productive, and dynamic lives—a program that eventually grew into the residential community in Unionville, Conn., which continues to support the independence of its residents in self-directed, apartment-style living.

Herman kept in touch with �鶹���� throughout her life and often invited CA students to visit Memorial Hospital. CA also published her poems in its bulletins and magazine on several occasions, and her essays “Quiet Places” and “We Must Look Around Us in Awareness” reflect her insight and equanimity.

“Christmastide” was painted by Joan Shaw Herman ’46 and copied from a color photo taken by Elizabeth Wheeler. It was painted with a brush held in her teeth and was begun March 1959 and finished October 1960.

The Establishment of the Award

After Herman passed away in 1975, the Executive Committee of the Alum Association found a way for Herman, and her inspiring example, to live on at CA. When they established the award the following year, they specified that it would not be given for service to �鶹����; all other criteria were left undefined. Thus, many have received the distinction for their professional work, others for volunteer service, in a variety of fields.

The Joan Shaw Herman Award testifies to a common value shared by the �鶹���� community. The alum who have received the award since Herman herself did serve as inspirations for leading lives that benefit others.

��

In Service of Sustainability

Since �鶹���� first honored Herman with this award, 41 individuals have been given this distinction. Each have their own remarkable life stories—stories of service to others, and, in many cases, of service to our earth. Indeed, care for people, especially underprivileged populations, and the pursuit of environmental justice are often intertwined.��

As �鶹���� celebrated its 100th birthday with a focus on service and sustainability, we also recognized several alums who have received the Joan Shaw Herman Award for their work to protect and sustain our natural environment. These individuals include:

In 2000, attorney Deborah Ham ’55 received the award posthumously for her efforts to save Pinto Creek in Arizona, joining with the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, America Rivers, and a band of concerned citizens to preserve it from copper mining, up to the hour of her sudden death in 1998.

In 2006, Victoria Post Ranney ’56 was honored for developing a planned community, Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Ill., that actively promotes the principles of environmental protection, energy conservation, and racial and economic diversity.��

In 2007, Katharine Muller Bullitt ’42 received the award for her lifelong dedication to social activism. In her work as a volunteer and a board member, she addressed a wide range of issues including civil rights, quality integrated education, women’s rights, peace and international understanding, and environmental protection of the Pacific Northwest.��

In 2014, the award was given to Robin Alden ’69 in recognition of a successful new model for managing near-shore fisheries, which aligned community organizing with the latest scientific research. She observed that fishing is the “perfect meeting of environment and economics: If it is done right, it can sustain communities forever.”

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To that end, the co-heads have focused on educating themselves about a variety of issues their members bring to meetings and have prioritized connecting with local organizations to confirm that what they are doing to help is beneficial. Among their many projects, CASA students have placed particular focus on addressing food insecurity. During the fall semester, building on the particular interest of a club member in this area, they made time for discussions about root causes with the hopes of acting rooted in awareness of their own privilege. Then they took action, working with organizations such as  and , with the latter on its “Pie in the Sky” annual Thanksgiving bake sale fundraiser.

“CASA is the place where we first felt inspired to get involved, and we stay active because there’s always something more we can be doing to help,” the co-heads say. “We also have such meaningful connections with the organizations we work with and have been able to see the impact of our work.”

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, volunteering locally in person has been challenging,” says science teacher Susan Flink P’13, who has long been the faculty advisor to CASA. But, she adds, CASA adapted. Last year, instead of making blankets for Brookview House, an organization serving women, children, and youth experiencing homelessness, they made blanket kits for families to assemble. This year, they happily resumed this annual project together in person in CA Labs.

This spring, CASA has played a major role in facilitating collaboration across the school to plan service activities for the campus celebration of CA Centennial Days of Service and Sustainability on April 22. “Together, we ensured that our day will be spent doing meaningful workshops that are impactful to the greater community and are truly making a positive difference, rather than partaking in performative activism,” the co-heads say. “We are so excited to celebrate CA’s birthday and hope the CA community finds the work on this day as meaningful as we do.”

The CASA co-heads encourage all students to share ideas for service with them. “CASA is such a big organization that we have the ability to take on multiple projects at once,” the co-heads say. “We love when people come to us with ideas, and we do our best to make them happen.” After April 22, CASA’s plans are to help relief efforts in Ukraine and collect art supplies to donate to Sri Lanka.

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